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Rocket Queen
For All Nails #156: Rocket Queen by Walter R. Strapps (with thanks to Noel Maurer) ---- :Excerpt from Chapter 12 of :Total War - The History and Battles of the Global War, 1939-1948 (New York, November 1974) :Chapter 12: Weapons of War ... The Global War ignited an explosion of intellectual pursuits. Needless to say, this explosion was mainly in the field of arms, weapons, and military doctrine. Perhaps no weapons technology came more into its own than the rocket. The scientists and weapon-smiths of virtually all countries involved in the global conflagration found new and wondrous (and sometimes disastrous and idiotic) uses for rockets. The most well-known and effective use of the rocket in the first stage of the war (running from 1939 to 1942) was the United Empire use of the rocket airmobile. The repeated assaults on the British Isles by German airmobile forces led to an immediate and pressing need for some sort of air defence. This came in the form of the rocket airmobile, which was little more than a large rocket with a pilot's cabin and a pair of autoguns on each of the rather stubby wings (by comparison to the more conventional propeller-driven aircraft). Unlike the air-breathing rocketmobiles that saw action during the later part of the war, these early rocketmobiles carried their own supply of liquid oxidant. North American and British popular histories of the Global War tend to focus on the Redtail liquid-fuelled rocket airmobile. The romantic aura around the Redtail, however, and the focus on the vehicle's final design obscures the series of ill-known and sometimes catastrophic failures which preceded the Redtail. It also obscures the fact that the Redtail, for all its dramatic success during the second and third invasion attempts, was rapidly superceded by the Lancer-GA-series air-breathing rocket airmobile. Early liquid-fuelled rocket airmobile designs had a depressing tendency to explode violently and without warning on the runway or shortly after take-off. Once it was determined that the engines were being manufactured with inferior materials, British engineers quickly rectified the problem. Nevertheless, the program probably would have been cancelled had it not become the darling of the Prince of Wales, who personally volunteered to be a test-pilot for the next set of prototypes. With the Prince's support (the RAA Command turned down the Prince's request to be a test-pilot on the ostensible grounds that he was "too valuable a national resource," although rumors persist that the real reason was mental instability) the rocket airmobile program actually accelerated, running quickly through various prototypes until a functional version of the rocket air-mobile was developed. (For a closer examination of the stages of rocket airmobile evolution see Appendix G: The War in the Air). The Redtail made a remarkable showing when first unveiled against German bombers and except for a few niggling problems with the landing capability of the airmobile (which by the Global War's end accounted for fully 12 percent of all United Empire pilot casualties) the United Empire continued to export various forms of the vehicle to allied militaries around the world ... ... The Japanese were the first to use rockets for long-distance bombardment. As early as 1939, the Japanese used large terramobiles equipped with rockets mounted on the exterior which were used very effectively against Siberian incursions in Fukien and Manchuria. After the Mexican sneak attack in 1942, the Japanese continuously upgraded the range and accuracy of their rocket artillery. By 1950, their ground-attack ballistic rockets had a range of nearly 100 miles and an accuracy to within half a mile. ... the most ingenious use of rockets by the Japanese was for air defense. Launched from the ground, the 'Pleasant Breeze' air defense system entered service in 1943. Rather than dumb-fired, ground-based controllers guided the missile towards the radar return of enemy bombers. An acoustic proximity fuse detonated the warhead when it got close enough to its target. Famously, many of the Pleasant Breeze operators were pilots who had suffered injuries during the early battles against Mexico. FN1 The Mexican Army Air Corps never recovered from the concerted rocket attacks which decimated their medium and heavy bomber forces over the home islands of the Japanese. In fact, these Japanese air defence rockets are memorialised in the popular Mexican song "Bombs Bursting in Air," which some have jokingly called for to be made the national hymn of the United States of Mexico ... ... in general, German rocket technology lagged the British and Japanese ... by far the German Flugkörpertruppen (rocket troops) was the most bizarre use of rocket technology during the war. Facing reversals on all fronts, the Germans decided to make one final attempt to capture the British Isles and force the United Empire to capitulate. The catastrophic failure of this invasion was in no small part due to the Germans' own use of rocket technology. ... no doubt within the files of the Reich War Ministry is the name of the person who devised the Flugkörpertruppen ... the men who approved the program surely deserve to be locked in a mental asylum ... The Germans used the rocket troops in two ways. The first were as standard skytroopers, only delivered by the disposable Maus rocket. The hope was that the Maus, which was both far cheaper than the standard airmobiles used to carry skytroopers and could fly at speeds of up to 500 miles per hour, could effectively penetrate British air defense systems. The rockets would then disgorge twenty to twenty-four skytroopers who would fallscreen out over the countryside and fight from behind enemy lines. The problems with this approach were many. First and foremost, the erratic propulsion and navigation mechanism of the Maus rockets meant that skytroopers jumped into the English Channel, into Ireland, into Scotland and in some cases, into the North Sea. Fewer than twenty percent of the skytroopers landed anywhere near their designated landing zones. Scattered across the British Isles, most were easily detained and disarmed by the Home Guard. In fact, the unmanned Maus rockets which continued on their way did more damage than the troops they were carrying, though this is largely the result of one of them starting a fire in northern Manchester which took several days to extinguish. The second use of German rocket troops was clearly devised by a madman. Not content with putting men inside rocket propelled craft, the rockets were accompanied by a typically German (and complex) harness mechanism which was to be detached when the 'pilot' was over the target area. The number of problems with this idea were manifold, but perhaps the most spectacular aspect of the devices (more so than the random directions they had a tendency to shoot off in, the high-rate of unconsciousness suffered by the pilots and the legendary difficulty in unfastening the harness) was during take-off. Admittedly, the most likely cause for the spectacular failure was ironically improvements in petrochemical refining which produced a much more volatile fuel. However, the blame for using this improved fuel without actually testing it is clearly the main fault. It's hard to imagine what it must have been life to be torn apart as the rocket you were strapped to accelerated to several hundred miles per hour in the space of a few fractions of a second, but we don't have to imagine what it was like to watch your entire flight have this happen to them while you yourself were dragged around the concrete launching pad, through buildings and finally into the trees which surrounded the airmobile base. To quote the eloquent Hpt. Hans Freilenger, FKT (ret.) in his recent memoir 'The Censored High Command and the Censored Global War' (banned in the German Reich). "It was like watching some sort of censored fireworks going off as the censored rockets headed for the censored sky and censored body parts went flying censored everywhere. It was all censored started and censored ended in a censored matter of a censored few seconds, and before I could censored get my censored hands on my censored censored censored censored harness, my censored face was being censored scraped off on the censored launching pad ... when I censored came to, those censored were still censored hosing off the censored censored runway." Needless to say, this failure contributed to the lack of success in the fourth attempt at invading Britain. ---- All mistakes and confusing sentences are mine (especially in the last section), in spite of editing assistance from Noel Maurer. (WRS) Forward to FAN #157 (November 1974): Out ta Get Me. Return to For All Nails. Category: Global War